The present invention relates to a document display system and an electronic dictionary, more particularly to a document display system that enables words in an electronic document to be looked up easily in an electronic dictionary.
Dictionaries have recently become available on media, such as disks, that make the dictionary entries accessible to a personal computer or other electronic device. To look up a word in such an electronic dictionary, the user types the word on a keyboard; the meaning of the word then appears on a display screen. Various types of electronic dictionaries are available, including dictionaries of foreign languages.
Among the users of electronic dictionaries are people who retrieve electronic documents from computer networks. The retrieval of such documents has recently been greatly facilitated by the emergence of hypertext. In a hypertext document, certain items (e.g. words) are marked as being linked to other documents, and the user can proceed from one document to another simply by selecting the indicated items with a pointing device. The linking of computer resources throughout the world into a so-called world-wide web, and the commercial availability of software that facilitates browsing through hypertext documents, have brought many users into contact with documents in many languages, and documents on many specialized subjects.
Electronic dictionaries can be an extremely useful aid to the comprehension of such documents, but unfortunately, the ease with which a person can proceed from one document to another is not matched by the ease with which the person can look up an unknown word in a document. Conventional systems that display hypertext documents are not designed for displaying entries in electronic dictionaries, so to find the meaning of a word, the user must access the electronic dictionary in the usual manner, by typing the word separately. When there are many words to be looked up, this can become an irksome and time-consuming process.
The problem could be solved by browsing software that incorporated an electronic dictionary internally, but it is not practical to equip browsing software with all the dictionaries that might be required by all potential users, nor is it reasonable to expect a person who purchases browsing software also to pay for a large number of electronic dictionaries, or even for one electronic dictionary. It is furthermore inefficient for each user to have to store a large number of dictionaries on his or her own computer.